From John John Florence's Maps of Home to global domination!

Five years back Port Lincoln-born chef Sammy Smith was living in Bondi Beach slinging coffees and in-vogue plats du jour from his and his gal’s cafe Porch and Parlour.

Sammy always had his acoustic guitar around, played covers at a few joints, interesting voice, nothing real fancy on the axe but good enough to have patrons swaying on their stools.

Nothing to suggest that, in what seemed like overnight, he’d deliver half-a-dozen surf anthems with one, Red Bellied Black Snake, getting used 250 million times on TikTok, 629k on Instagram, the sort of metrics that gets a man paid a decent sorta sum even in these reductive times.

Sammy wrote Red Bellied Black Snake about having to be the face of customer service at his cafe “but in my mind I’m this venomous Red Bellied Black snake about to hiss,” he tells me from his joint in Fremantle in West Oz.

A couple of Bondi’s super hero musicians, Kirin J Callinan, famous for his cover of the 1998 underground hit The Homosexual, and Julian Sudek, producer of Australian duo Royel Otis, performing under the handle The Beefs, added a little extra flavour, the trio working out of a garage overlooking a grinding lefthander over the hill from Bondi.

“They added something to that demo that it didn’t have. It became fast and intense, almost like dance music. Whatever they did with it, it worked. I understand why it’s popular on TikTok. There’s a count-in for chicks to get their gear on in fashion videos, it’s snappy and upbeat.”

Best of all, “It’s paying really fucking well, which happens when you’re not signed to a record label and some fat greasy cunt smoking cigars is taking your money.”

Red Bellied Black Snake by The Beefs took off when John John’s filmer Erik Knutson used it in Maps of Home.

“That was it, Maps of Home is a crazy film. To me, if there was a story on the best surf movie part in history, that would definitely be in the top ten. So lucky. It was a real kickstart. Kelly Slater used it on a clip on Instagram the other day.”

The idea of the Beefs started off a bit of a joke, Sammy wanting his humour to come out in his music, the result being an eighties pastiche, homage, whatever you want to call it to Australia’s belle epoch. The Beefs do for eighties Australian pub pop what Orville Peck did for country music.

Sammy’s humour is evident in the song Rubber Arm. A man goes to get his car from the pub and slips in for a beer. Gets too drunk to derive. The car lives at the pub for ten years.

Recently, Sammy has spent the last month commuting from Perth to the east coast to play a series of support gigs for the singer Ruby Fields. Tough work for a man with two lil kids at a pottery biz called Porch Ceramics eating up his time.

Still he ain’t complaining.

“It would’ve been nice for it to hit a little earlier but, who fucking knows, now’s the time to start living.”

A fav of mine is Country Member with its classic refrain, “I’m a Cunt! I’m a Cunt!”

Have a lil sing along here to Red Bellied Black Snake here.

One, two
One, two, three, what!

Dreamin’ on a Sunday afternoon, I’ve got the
Best part of the day up my sleeve
Sadly, it will all be over soon, I’ve gotta
Get back to the place and keep
Keep up appearances

Red-bellied
Red-bellied

Dodgin’
Dodgin’ out of view, I feel like
Ducking for cover in my sleep
Handball
I handball it to you, I’ve had
Enough of experience
Can’t work with these ingredients

Red-bellied
I’ve got a red-bellied black snakе
In my mind
And I’d like to invite you
But I think it might bite you
I’vе got a red-bellied black snake
In my mind

Dreamin’ on a Sunday afternoon, I’ve got the
Best part of the day up my sleeve

I’ve got a red-bellied black snake
In my mind
I’ve got a red-bellied black snake
In my mind
And I’d like to invite you
But I think it might bite you
I’ve got a red-bellied black snake
In my mind

I’ve got a red-bellied black snake
In my mind

I’ve got a red-bellied black snake
In my mind

This should be of grave concern to all Americans who do not want to live in a banana republic ruled by a tiny group of libertine, monopoly capitalists.

(Editor’s note: In January 2024, Peter Maguire the surfer, war crimes investigator and author ofThai Stick: Surfers, Scammers, and the Untold Story of the Marijuana Trade. Law and War, Facing Death in Cambodia and Breathe, the Rickson Gracie bio, wrote about the unanswered questions surrounding the Jeffrey Epstein affair. We’re reprinting it here after the new Republican administration got chilled feet about releasing what they alleged during the campaign was some real hot stuff.)

After reading some of the Jeffrey Epstein documents released last week, I feel obligated to state the obvious. Although there are salacious, slightly disgusting new details—like the fourteen-year-old girl who told Palm Beach police investigators that Epstein “wacked off” during his massage, had a Chia Pet-like hairline “that continued to his buttocks,” and his “wee wee was very tiny”—blackmail, not sex, is at the center of the Epstein affair.

Last week, Lisa Hagan of PBS, and many others in the mainstream press, argued that it was a “conspiracy theory” to contend that what “the public is shown about Epstein isn’t the real story.” I reject this view because the mainstream press has failed so egregiously to report “the real story.” I would like to point out some basic facts:

• Alex Acosta, the Florida district attorney who allowed Epstein to escape serious punishment for his sex crimes against minors in 2008, allegedly told Vanity Fair’s Vicky Ward that he was informed by superiors that “Epstein belonged to intelligence and to leave it alone.”
• FBI Special Agent Kelly Maguire [no relation], who led the 2019 raid on Epstein’s NYC townhouse, testified under oath that she opened Epstein’s safes and they contained notebooks full of carefully labeled DVDs and computer hard drives.
When Maguire returned a few days later with a warrant to seize them, she “observed that all of the items that are in this photograph that I had previously seen were missing.” Although this evidence was eventually returned by Epstein’s lawyer, Maguire could only speculate that it had not been tampered with.
• Ghislaine Maxwell told a friend that Epstein’s island in the Caribbean “had been completely wired for video; the friend thought that she and Epstein were videotaping everyone on the island as an insurance policy, as blackmail.

The anomalies in the Epstein affair are endless. Suffice it to say, it is now blindingly obvious that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell entrapped and blackmailed some of the world’s most powerful people. Honeytraps, compromat, and blackmail are some of the oldest tools in espionage.

If the mainstream press was actually willing to do their job, they would ask some simple questions that remain unanswered:

What happened to all of the DVDs and photographs seized at Epstein’s properties?

Who was featured in these DVDs and photographs?

Who were Epstein and Maxwell working for?

Who financed this sophisticated operation?

Today, when I hear members of the legacy media use the words “conspiracy theory,” “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “trope,” or “dog whistle,” I immediately grow suspicious because it means that another “counterspeech” campaign is coming.

In 2008, Harvard law professor and now Homeland Security official, Cass Sunstein, laid out the counterspeech doctrine in a paper entitled, “Conspiracy Theories.”

The prominent American legal scholar suggested the U.S. government recruit “nongovernmental officials” to pose as “independent experts with information” so they could “prod them into action from behind the scenes.”

Don’t like Hillary Clinton? Trump supporter!

Object to open borders? White Nationalist!

Don’t support an open-ended war in Ukraine? Putin stooge!

Don’t want digital currency? Conspiracy theorist!

If public ridicule and shame are not enough to silence and dissuade critics, the alphabet soup agencies in Washington can now reach out to the real arbiters of free speech in 21st-century America, the Sultans of Silicon Valley.

Not only do they now control the flow of information, they, as I learned in 2022, hold the power to silence by deplatforming. This matter should be of grave concern to all Americans who do not want to live in a banana republic ruled by a tiny group of libertine, monopoly capitalists whose transhumanist decadence would have impressed de Sade himself.

Amid all the commercial avarice, what is to become of the humble Bali surf shop?

(Editor’s note: Read this story with the author imagined in your head: a moustachioed, hard-loving American ex-pat, living in Bali a decade or so, Indonesian wife, a small cabin down a side street in Uluwatu, a man prone to romantic hyperbole about surf shops. A few weeks back, I rented boards from the joint I link in the story, White Monkey. I was presented with two brand-new sleds, tailpads already affixed, fins, leashes and a couple of blocks of Sex Wax in the package. Highly recommended ’cause ain’t nothing better than travelling without surfboards.)

With the pillage of Bali’s Bukit Peninsula by off-island villa and luxury resort developers hurtling into the future unchecked, concerns have been raised about the preservation of the authenticity of the Bukit’s original surfing scene and intent.

One pressing question is, amid all the commercial avarice, what is to become of the humble surf shop? Which in all proper surfing communities worldwide, serve as temples of sorts? A safe house for us believers, a place to, more than just buy a new board, celebrate our very faith in the sport?

Because with an authentic surf shop, it’s not the destination, it’s the belonging to it.

You know, the real surf shop. By surfers and for surfers. The one that smells like a surf shop. Like freshly applied surf wax as soon as walk in the doors. The smell of the curing fiberglass of new boards, the scent of waves to be ridden. It’s the smell of hot batch ding repair and of salt and the sea and the smell of anticipation and potential and a kind of love.

What the place can give you as a passionate surfer. That it reminds you and demands of you that you call yourself a surfer and that it feels delicious and fulfilling to do so. To hell with conventional society, surfing is a deep meaning in your life and that this place, this shop, is an understanding between you and it and it just feels so damn good.

And that you not so much as walk in the doors. Rather, you enter its realm. Your realm. Because it is. It’s yours. A real surf shop is like going inside that special part of your mind. The part of your mind that loves surfing and everything about it and you don’t need to explain it or ask permission to enjoy it and you do not need to hide it and you can shake your fist at anybody that does, man or woman.

And you don’t have to buy a thing, maybe a bar of wax, but that’s just to feel complete.

And it’s not a place where you call people who surf athletes. You call them by their real name. Surfers. Surfers who play in the biggest, most powerful thing on earth. Frolicking or surviving in the very powers that shape the continents. The powers of the restless sea. The biggest thing on the planet.

And it is ours. The surfers. Like artists swimming in their own paint. It’s the girls behind the counter with their flashing smiles and their movements as graceful as deer. It’s all those boards that are up on the ceiling. Boards given to the shop by the all the visiting pro’s. Boards that are still waxed and stickered and beat up from being under the feet of the best. It’s just imagining the places those boards have been, the accolades they have received, the hollows they’ve ridden, the podiums they have stood upon.

A real surf shop is too many boards in the racks and too many dreams and too many dimensions and too many designs and too many ideas and memories and stories and hopes. It’s the constant barrage of surf movies on the screens that provide a visual exclamation points to the whole trip. And it’s the soundtrack over the shop speakers. It doesn’t matter which songs, they all sound right.

And it’s the other members of the tribe speaking of the sacred words of stoke in a million different languages. Yet everyone understands each other. It’s holding brand new un-waxed boards in your bare hands and under your arms and flipping them over to check the specs and running your fingers over the sacred contours and knowing where these boards will fit on a waves. Your waves.

It’s a brotherhood and a sisterhood of the mankind you like. The mankind that makes sense to you. The mankind of the sea of joy. Your joy.

And man, if you think this all this is over the top, if you think all this is crazy, maybe you are not cut out to be a surfer. Maybe you are just an enthusiast. Maybe it’s just a hobby to you, a pastime. A curiosity. A recreation. And maybe that’s cool.

But it’s not right.

Right is being in a real surf shop and knowing that you are right where you belong.